labor quickly. He commonly works six-day weeks, and his twelve-hour days begin with chopping vegetables and end with cleaning the kitchen. On the whole, he is thankful for the long hours, because that means more money for him and more money to send home. If an owner is too demanding, Rain’s solution is to return to New York, find another restaurant in another small town, and begin again.
He is working hard to pay off his debt and is sending money home, but he has no immediate plans to return to China because his income in the United States is far greater than he could earn in his hometown or in any of the new factories in the urban centers. However, he does feel isolated and lonely. His biggest worry is securing U.S. citizenship.
Note: Based on “The Kitchen Network: America’s Underground Chinese Restaurant Workers” by Lauren Hilgers, 2014, The New Yorker, October 13, 2014.
Exhibit 1.5 Kavita: A Young Indian Woman Navigates Night Work and Call Center Employment
Kavita is a twenty-two-year-old woman who works in a call center in Bangalore, India. Owing to the time difference that separates Bangalore from the United States, Kavita works a night shift so that her schedule fits American workday rhythms. She has learned to suppress her Indian accent, has familiarized herself with American vernacular, and takes pride in her work. Her job is very demanding, as she has to understand the scripts that guide interactions, quickly understand client needs, and sometimes diffuse hostile encounters from frustrated customers. As soon as one client hangs up the phone, another call is funneled into Kavita’s headset and she begins anew.
The night shift that Kavita works carries with it perils. One concern is the very real physical danger that confronts women in Indian society when darkness falls. Even simple necessities, such as going to the restroom outside of the home, carry with them such risks that women try their best to avert physical need. Another concern is the stigma associated with night work, which is traditionally associated with prostitution and other morally suspect behaviors.
Call center work compares favorably to other industries in India, but it is demanding and competition for jobs is fierce. Any position might have as many as five hundred applicants. Kavita sought work at the call center because she wanted the freedoms that her income provides. Many of her coworkers labor because of more desperate financial needs. With her $300/month income she has been able to rent a small apartment and recently hired a maid.
Kavita sees call center work as a stepping-stone in her life but is not inclined to think about the next steps yet. She does heed (to a great extent) her parents’ warning that her conduct needs to reflect favorably on family and to be mindful of how women should act if they are to find a good spouse. Living in modern India, Kavita can potentially form a relationship that might develop into a “love marriage” but is pressured by her parents to have an arranged marriage. By virtue of working in the global economy, Kavita and her coworkers are challenging many conventional ways of defining women’s place in Indian society.
Note: Based on Working the Night Shift: Women in India’s Call Center Industry by Reena Patel, 2010, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Exhibit 1.6 Mike: A Disadvantaged Youth Enters a Life of Crime
Mike lives on 6th Street in Philadelphia. Aside from its concentrated poverty and predominantly black racial composition, there are two things to note about Mike’s neighborhood: few good jobs are to be found there and police surveillance is pervasive. Because of limited employment options, crime and the illegal work that operates in an underground economy are common. The hyperpolicing that attempts to control Mike and his friends operates with scant tolerance for illegal behavior, focusing on sorting the “dirty” residents from the “clean.” Those who are dirty—like Mike, who engages in the drug trade—face likely imprisonment. Not everyone on 6th Street is dirty. Compared to some other residents, Mike was not as entirely disadvantaged. His mother worked multiple jobs and kept a clean house.
Mike was first arrested at age thirteen for carrying marijuana, but unlike the lenient treatment that he might have received if the same infraction occurred in a middle-class community, he was convicted, given a record, and placed on probation. By the time Mike reached age twenty-two, he had two children with his girlfriend and was selling crack cocaine for extra money to supplement the limited income he earned in a part-time job at a pharmaceutical warehouse. Mike lost his job at the warehouse because he missed too much work while trying to also attend to the needs of his family, including the extra care demanded by his youngest daughter who was born with health problems. When he failed to find a replacement job, he turned to selling drugs as a primary source of income. The rest of his life has unfolded as a story of a life on the run, with incarceration and the prospect of jail time removing him further and further from the hope of ever attaining secure legitimate employment.
Note: Based on On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (pp. 14–19) by Alice Goffman, 2014, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
The six vignettes, all based on real people performing real work, give a sense of the diversity, opportunity, and constraint that exist in the new economy. For Meg and Kavita, economic changes have opened new opportunities, but they coexist with enduring sets of expectations about what mothers and daughters should provide to their spouses, parents, and children. These cultural orientations seem more appropriate to another era and lag behind what these workers ideally want for themselves and, in many instances, what they can provide for others. For Tammy, the moving platform of history has introduced new career tensions because the types of jobs she performed during her entire career have become more difficult to find. And as she tried to find security by investing in the new economy, her meager savings vanished. Emily is one of a new breed of contract workers, and she is figuring out how to create security in a context where employers are increasingly inclined to hire workers for short-term task assignments. Rain exemplifies the type of worker who is commonly cast as a social problem—the undocumented immigrant. On closer examination, his involvement in work is probably not displacing any American workers, and his commitment to work conforms to core American ideals of personal responsibility and effort. In contrast, native-born Mike is not integrated into an opportunity structure that lends itself to upward advancement. While he has made mistakes, even if he had not, the odds have been stacked against him from the start. All of these workers challenge archetypal images of the typical worker, someone who holds a secure 9-to-5 job.Taken together, these six individuals help establish the foundation of an important argument presented in this book: that in the new economy there is no “typical” worker.
The careers of these workers are influenced by demands and social ties off the job. All these workers are making career decisions in the context of their linkages to others. In some circumstances, children are the priority, whereas in other cases, it is the needs of spouses, aging parents, or both (Neal and Hammer 2006; Sweet and Moen 2006). These life-stage circumstances play an important role in shaping worker behavior, expectations, and needs. How people respond to these circumstances is heavily influenced by cultural scripts (e.g., assumptions about what parents should provide for their children) and the availability of resources, which varies from person to person and group to group. And beyond family ties, the contexts of neighborhoods and communities influence one’s ability to find work, the resources to prepare for work, and the security to engage in work (Bookman 2004; Sampson, Morenoff, and Gannon-Rowley 2002; Swisher, Sweet, and Moen 2004; Voydanoff 2007). In a word, a good characterization of workers’ lives on and off the job is complex. Work today introduces various strains and tensions, and strains and tensions experienced off the job affect the capacity to work.
Culture and Work
One of the core questions guiding the sociology of work concerns how much work should be performed and the amount of work that should be expected of individuals
